a resto shaman and "her sisters and her cousins and her aunts"

Archive for the ‘Order Hall’ Category

After finishing up the Warrior campaign, I did Priest & Paladin in parallel, alternating between them. Despite the dire circumstances, the twins were delighted to be able to work together for their Order Hall Campaigns — and the members of their orders observed and recognized the special synergy between them. Then I pushed through the rest of Death Knight because I just wanted to be done already with Order Hall Campaigns. I got spoiled on how the DK campaign ends long ago — one reason why I was saving it for last — and it was as epic… and troubling… as advertised.

I’m feeling kind of burned out on WoW now — having a 5-day break while I attend this chemical education conference is actually rather refreshing!

My Priest also picked up the Hidden appearance for her Disc Artifact. So far, I’ve gotten the Hidden appearances for Arcane Mage, Fire Mage, Frost Mage, Brewmaster Monk, Holy Paladin, Enhancement Shaman, Beastmaster Hunter, and Guardian Druid.
Interestingly, though Kamalia hasn’t obtained the base Hidden appearances for Elemental or Resto, she has the 200 WQ tint of those appearances available for her to use.
I’ll have to come back at level 120 to farm the dungeon drops for the Hidden appearances for Balance Druid and Holy Priest.
I’d thought about getting the Feral Druid one for Kerisa, but I decided instead to get it with my Highmountain Tauren Druid.

Niskara, Niskara, Niskara… Marksmanship Hunter, Blood Death Knight, and Holy Priest all go there at the very beginning of things to get Artifacts. Warlocks go there for Chapter 2 of their campaign. Paladins and Priests have an intersecting storyline there near the end of Chapter 3 & beginning of Chapter 4 of their respective campaigns. Demon Hunters and Warriors conclude their campaigns there. From a meta perspective, I recognize that this place is a hub to answer the common complaint about art resources being created that only a small fraction of the playerbase will ever see (locations such as Kezan, the Broken Isles, Gilneas-before-the-Cataclysm, and the Wandering Isle, for example) and to reduce the load on the art team. From an in-universe lore perspective, though, why is this scrap of a world such a central location? Might that have been explained in some bit of quest text that I have long since forgotten?

I was greatly relieved to read Gnomecore’s report that the gear from the Darkshore WQs uses the new character selection screen/Boosted/Warlords Salvage Yard models — I have all of those already, so no need for me to run myself ragged trying to collect them. Between missing 5 days of play time and wanting to finally do the Argus campaign when I get back, I may end up doing all three chapters of the War of Thorns back-to-back with just one character per faction on the night of August 12th. On the Alliance side, it will be Kerithian the Night Elf Druid, of course. On the Horde side, I’m thinking it will be Kelisanna the Rogue, to observe and report on Sylvanas’ operations for Regent Lord Theron.

And now you have seen the other project that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks.

I was sad to see that the insta-WQ item was gone. It makes sense why, though. Like the Garrison & Order Hall gold missions, it would have been a thing that some people would have felt compelled to keep coming back for, and so they removed it. I have gotten enough from it, though. I accumulated enough Marks of Honor to get all the Legion PvP sets I wanted — as well as a number of PvP sets or items from previous expansions — with a small pile left over. I also got enough Honor that when the Patch 8.0 changes went through, my collective Honor level went up to 10 and earned me the default tint of the PvP appearance for my Artifacts — something that I wasn’t even trying to accomplish.

Rogue, Monk, and Hunter completed their Order Hall Campaigns.
Knowing what will be beginning today, and knowing that the devs are working story on at least the rough outline level an expansion or two in advance, the ending of the Rogue campaign left a slightly bitter, sour taste in the mouth.
The voice of the Dwarf Monk champion Angus Ironfist reminds me of that of my paternal grandfather.
If the Hunters need specialized ammunition to take on the felhounds being bred by Hakkar the Houndmaster at the felhound place in Faronaar, how is it that everyone else can just waltz in there and take them on with only their usual toolkits?

I hoped to get Warrior done, too, but then I hit a “do some more Champion missions” and didn’t want to stay up all night waiting for them. At this very late stage of the expansion, I didn’t have any trouble with the Ulduar scenario stage of the Warrior campaign, but with so many huge AOE packs!, I can see how it would have been absolutely brutal early in the expansion.

So I’ll finish Warrior tonight, and then I’ll have Priest, Paladin, and Death Knight left. I probably won’t be able to finish all of them by next Tuesday, because the chemical education conference that I’ve been anticipating all summer is Sunday through Thursday of next week. I should be able to finish them before August 13th, though… and hopefully I can get my Demon Hunter through Argus by then, too…

Although I would dearly like Kaelinda to have the golden eyes, her face is not one of the three golden-eyed faces.
Kelisanna’s face, though, is.Kelisanna was probably at the Sunwell the day that Quel’Delar was purified there; she would have known that Kaelinda and Karaelia were travelling there, and why, and as a member of Lor’themar’s intelligence corps, she would have considered that she ought to be there for security reasons. She would also have been at the Sunwell the day that Kaelinda brought First Arcanist Thalyssra there and Alleria Windrunner showed up coincidentally (but not, to a spy, unexpectedly), for similar reasons. Either one of those events could have given her enough of an infusion of Light to cause the change in her eye color. She claims, however, that it was merely the extended exposure to all that gold in the Vault of the Uncrowned that did it.

But… I wasn’t really feeling it. If Kaelinda couldn’t have the golden eyes, it didn’t seem quite right for another of my established Blood Elf characters to have them instead. After a few days, I changed Kelisanna’s face back to the version with green eyes.

I still wanted a golden-eyed Blood Elf, though.

Long ago, I had a Blood Elf Paladin. Then Cataclysm gave us Tauren Paladins, and having two Horde Paladins felt redundant. So I faction-swapped my Blood Elf Paladin into a Dwarf, because Dwarf Paladins are awesome. I’ve been happy with my Dwarf Paladin — but in the back of my mind, I’ve missed my Blood Elf Paladin.

So I rolled a new, golden-eyed Blood Elf Paladin. She has the same hair color as and is indirectly named after the female Blood Elf Paladin who was the guild leader and healing leader of the guild with whom BTH and I raided Karazhan through Ulduar.

Before I faction transferred her, I’d gotten my original Blood Elf Paladin up to about level 63 or 64, which was high enough to solo the pre-Cataclysm Blood Elf Paladin mount quest chain. Because by that point in Wrath the Paladin mounts were learned automatically with riding skills at level 20 & 40, I did the quest chain primarily to get the auxiliary reward of the Blood Knight Tabard — which then got transmuted into a generic guild tabard when I faction transferred her. I was relieved to see that my new Blood Elf Paladin had access to the Blood Knight Tabard in the Appearances collection.

Speaking of interesting character appearances… There’s these blue-haired Eversong Elf Mages who show up in Kirin Tor places. I’m not sure if they’re actually supposed to be High Elves that have become blue-haired because of their exposure to arcane energy, or blue dragons in humanoid form. At any rate, the only way to achieve that look as a player character is to be a Blood Elf Death Knight (Void Elves don’t have that exact shade of blue, and their hairstyles are different, so I couldn’t quite replicate that look with my Void Elf Mage — though I’m sure she’ll mimic their clothes anyway).

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve made and deleted a blue-haired Blood Elf Death Knight.

If I can create a new character just to have a golden-eyed Blood Elf… then I can create (again — and keep this time) a blue-haired Blood Elf.

Meet Kandrista the Eccentric, a Frost Death Knight who will frequently run around in a cloth robe, pretending that she’s a Frost Mage.

Cenarius finally coughed up the lookalike of the Emerald Nighthold Druid tier robe for Kerisa. Hooray!

My Warlock finished her Order Hall Campaign. Five done, seven left. Can I manage to get seven more Order Hall Campaigns completed in only four weeks — three and a half, really, because of this conference I’m going to at the end of the month?
I was surprised that compassion — albeit in the somewhat limited sense of even if you don’t give a damn about the rest of the world, you should still take care of the people who are part of your own community — emerged as one of the main themes of that story. I wasn’t expecting that from the Warlocks. Good job, devs!

I went and did the Wound quests in Silithus with Kamalia and Kaylynda, just in case they might go away in Patch 8.0.

I had been under the impression that one had to complete the Broken Shore campaign to do the Mage Tower Challenge, and I just didn’t have time energy or desire to do that. Reading posts about the imminent end of the Mage Tower Challenge, I realized that I’d been mistaken. So Kaelinda hurried to do the questchain that leads up to the Mage Tower Challenge, and do to the Wound quests in Silithus to get her Artifacts to be OP, and then I started trying the Frost Mage challenge. It is a kiting fight, and I am rubbish at kiting. After making a half-dozen-ish rather feeble attempts in which I felt like I was making little to no progress, I decided that I had other things — both in-game and out — that I’d rather spend my Monday evening doing. Specifically, my Rogue finished Chapter 3 of her Order Hall Campaign.

Many many thanks to Coffee Cakes & Crits, who tipped me off that the Tabard of the Lightbringer is BoE and can sometimes be found on the AH. I looked, and there it was. The list price of 255 K might not be much for some folks, but for me, it took a bit of pooling cash — with Kamalia and Kaelinda, who have been level 110 the longest and thus have had the most time to rake in gold from Order Hall missions, being the major donors — to be able to afford it.

Now Patch 8.0 is here, but there’s another week before the pre-launch-event quests begin. I’ll need to do those with the characters who will eventually be heading off into BfA content.
For the Blue Team, we have Kaylynda the Human Mage, Kerithian the Night Elf Druid, Kjerstin the Dwarf Shaman, and Kyraleia the Dwarf Paladin.
For the Red Team, we have Kaelinda the Blood Elf Mage, Kerisa the Tauren Druid, Kamalia the Tauren Shaman, and Keija the Tauren Warrior. Kaelinda, Kamalia, and Keija will have to go to Zandalar eventually because the only Professions I care about any more are the ones that make me things I can use for Mogging and they are my Tailor, Leatherworker, and Blacksmith, respectively. The leather-wearer position for the Red Team is theoretically flexible, but it will probably end up being Kerisa because of my four level 110 Horde leather-wearers, I am the most attached to her.

It was Darkmoon Faire week. Normally I do the Darkmoon Faire on Sunday, or maybe Monday, but last week I was more interested in pushing the Warlock and the Rogue through to 110. So I didn’t do the Darkmoon Faire until Wednesday. About half of my alts will get to 800 skill points in their primary professions next month, just before BfA launches. The rest will get to 800 skill points in September, just after BfA launches and the profession skill cap goes up again…

It was World Quests bonus week. Thirteen alts was too many; I didn’t get it done on all of them… let alone the ones who actually needed it the most.

I was distracted by re-mogging all of my characters who’d gotten dressed up for the Midsummer Fire Festival and needed to change their clothes after the holiday ended.

Kerisa was so close to completing the Druid campaign that I decided to just finish it up — including going to the Broken Shore and recruiting Thisalee Crow. I’ll probably do this — go to the Broken Shore to recruit the 9th champion as soon as I finish up the 7.0 campaign — with my remaining characters, too. Cenarius still didn’t give her the Emerald Nighthold Druid tier lookalike robe, though.

By queueing up for LFD while doing zone questing, I managed to get both the Warlock and the Rogue to level 110. Whew!

So now that everyone is finally at 110, what next?
Finishing eight more Order Hall Campaigns, of course.
I’m debating whether to try to focus them down one at a time or do a little bit with multiple characters each night. The first method would probably help me keep track of the stories better — I confess that with over a year between when I pushed everyone through Chapter 2 of their Order Hall Campaigns shortly before we got our baby and now, I don’t really remember what’s going on in any of them.

My Paladin and Monk also need to run 8 different dungeons to get their Order Hall pants. I’m keeping track of which dungeons they have to run as part of their Campaign so that then I can just run the ones they haven’t already done for the pants. I’d also like to get the Order Hall pants for my Warrior, Death Knight, Hunter, and Priest — but they can come back and solo Legion dungeons at level 120. It’s only the Paladin and Monk that I want to get done while Legion is still current content, because those are the Order Hall sets that I’m the most interested wearing as complete sets.

And I really need to go to Argus with somebody. When it’s Kirin Tor Emissary, I’ve been picking up Argussian Reach tokens with my Demon Hunter and Army of the Light tokens with my Alliance Mage. Because I’m more interested in the Void Elves than in the Lightforged Draenei, it’ll probably be the Demon Hunter who goes to Argus first.

Meanwhile, in the world beyond Azeroth…

One of my colleagues took a job at another institution in the state, so I spent a couple of weeks of June in search committee meetings finding his replacement. Our new faculty member has a lot of experience teaching general chemistry, but the person she’s replacing didn’t have any standard general chemistry in his courseload. To help her feel more comfortable in her first semester at a new institution, I decided to give her the option to take the section of general chemistry that has been “mine” for the past four years. She took it, so now I am rearranging my schedule and preparing to teach the rest of the courseload that had been assigned to the person who left: general education chemistry and physical science. These are two classes that I’ve never taught before, and I have a month and a half to prep them… So as much as I might like to daydream about tackling the Mage Tower Challenge with Kaelinda to get that beautiful Challenge apppearance for Ebonchill, or with Kelisanna to get those amazing rapiers for the Dreadblades, I really can’t afford to let myself get distracted by that…

We got our adoption legally finalized in April. We then waited until BTH’s parents returned from their mission to serve in the Bern Switzerland Temple before getting our adoption ecclesiastically finalized by having our son sealed to us in our local Temple this Saturday. Now we can finally say that our little boy is 100% ours!

My Druid got the cloak that matches her Tier set on her first run through Emerald Nightmare. The wing she’ll need to farm is Tormented Guardians because Cenarius drops the robe and the belt. She’ll need to farm Tichondrius in Nighthold, too, because he drops the shoulders (and there isn’t a lookalike for that piece).

My level 108 Paladin had been sitting on an Order Hall Campaign quest to run Legion Violet Hold since level 104 (before she could even queue for that dungeon). I originally leveled her as a Tank, but I hadn’t tanked for a group with her since she hit level 90 back in Mists — she LFRed as a Healer. But I hadn’t put as much AP into her Holy Artifact as into her Prot Artifact, so I steeled my nerves and queued as a Tank. I figured that Violet Hold wouldn’t be too bad to noob tank because the trash is waves on a timer and there’s no special path through the landscape that needs to be learned. I warned the group when I zoned in that I hadn’t tanked for a long time, and it went okay — the Demon Hunter DPS kept stealing aggro from me, but I think that it wasn’t deliberate, it was just that I was screwing up my threat generation. After turning in the Order Hall quest and its follow-up, I got her to level 110 by doing a little bit in Highmountain and completing the main storyline in Stormheim.

Six classes leveled to 110, six left to go. At this point, I am thinking that I will push through the leveling, then work on the Order Hall Campaigns.

When the Trial of Valor sets first showed up on the PTR way back when, I looked at them and thought that the cloth set was quite nice, the plate set was okay, and the other two were kind of meh. It occurred to me now, however, that I really ought to get the leather set, too, because shoes that show on Tauren hooves.
So my Druid ran Trial of Valor and got started on collecting the whatsits to get the Normal-mode version of the set from the quest. Then it occurred to me that I might as well pick up the mail and plate sets, too, even if it’s just for the sake of being able to use isolated items for mix-and-match later on. So Kamalia went to Trial of Valor, too, and my Paladin will start doing Trial of Valor as soon as I can get her geared up enough. I should have enough time to complete those quests before BfA launches by LFRing, but if I don’t, it’s no big deal because the quest whatsits also drop from Helarjar Landing WQs.

(Oh, hey, I just noticed that the Paladin boots from Tomb of Sargeras and Antorus also have pieces that show up fitted over Tauren hooves! Are there any others…?
While several sets of boots from this expansion have 3D pieces over the knees, the Shaman boots from Tomb of Sargeras were the only others that I found that had over-hoof pieces.)

During the past few weeks, I’ve also been making good progress on my RL summer to-do list. I’ve finished overhauling the homework assignments for the first semester of organic chemistry and have started working on re-doing the homework assignments for the second semester of organic chemistry. I’d been neglecting the front flower garden and the rosebed during the last few hectic weeks of the semester and they were full of huge weeds; I finally managed to get the weeds pulled, too.

My Fall Semester will begin the next week, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll have a week to play Battle for Azeroth before classes begin, because I’ll be stuck in faculty meetings of one sort or another for quite a bit of that week.

I have three rather massive school-related projects I need to work on over the summer — I desperately need to thoroughly overhaul my online homework assignments, I desperately need to write some Staff Notes for my lab manuals so that the stockroom assistants will be able to get the labs fully set up for me and I won’t have to scramble at the last minute trying to find stuff every week, and I need to revise and update my lab manuals.

I will need to focus on those projects during kiddo’s mid-day naptime.

So, I am looking at the things I want to accomplish in the Broken Isles and sorting them into things that must be done before August 14th because they require participating in Legion group content, and things that can wait because they don’t require participating in Legion group content.

Things that DO have to be done before August 14th
* Take Kamalia to the last wing of Nighthold LFR (Gul’dan) so that she can unlock the “Whispers of a Frightened World” scenario
* Do enough of Argus with Kiralaira to get through running the Seat of the Triumvirate dungeon; finishing up Argus after that point may have to wait
* Level Hunter, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Warlock, Death Knight, Monk, Warrior, and Druid to 110 and complete their 7.0 Order Hall Campaigns because ai-yi-yi so many dungeons that must be run
* Do Blacksmithing questchain until complete Demonsteel set can be crafted, because that process is sure to involve dungeons that must be run
* LFR Emerald Nightmare/Nighthold with Kerisa to get that Druid Tier set (I happen to think the LFR coloration is the prettiest for that set)
* Finish Broken Shore campaign with Kaelinda, because the Mage Flying Disc is the only Class Mount that I really really really want

Things that DON’T have to be done before August 14th
* Doing enough of Argus with Kamalia to unlock the other Magni Bronzebeard scenario (I forget what it is called right now) — unless that doesn’t open up until after the Seat of the Triumvirate part, in which case it will need to be done before
* Doing enough of the Broken Shore campaign to get everyone their last Order Hall Champion
* Taking Xe’ra’s Revisionist History of Illidan course with Kiralaira
* Doing Deaths of Chromie with Karaelia
* Recruiting the Highmountain Tauren and starting to level those new characters
* Recruiting the Void Elves and starting to level a Void Elf Mage

Unless BTH decides he wants to come back to WoW for the launch of Battle for Azeroth, I very well might NOT be going to Zandalar or Kul Tiras with the crowd on August 14th.